Ordinal Conditional Functions: A Dynamic Theory of Epistemic States

Abstract

Many of the philosophically most interesting notions are overtly or covertly epistemological. Overtly epistemological notions are, of course, the concept of belief itself, the concept of subjective probability, and, presumably the most important, the concept of a reason in the sense of a theoretical reason for believing something. Covertly epistemological notions are much more difficult to understand; maybe, they are not epistemological at all. However, a very promising strategy for understanding them is to try to conceive of them as covertly epistemological. One such notion is the concept of objective probability;¹ the concept of explanation is another. A third, very important one is the notion of causation, which has been epistemologically problematic ever since Hume. Finally, there is the notion of truth. Many philosophers believe that there is much to be said for a coherence theory of truth or internal realism; they hold some version of the claim that something for which it is impossible to get a true reason cannot be true, and that truth is therefore covertly epistemological.

Many have helped. I am very much indebted: first to Godehard Link for spending a Christmas vacation making various helpful remarks and suggestions; to Wolfgang Stegmüller and Max Drömmer for fruitful discussion; to Kurt Weichselberger for decisive help in Section 7; to Brian Skyrms and Bill Harper for giving me the opportunity to present this paper at their conference; to Peter Gärdenfors for further fruitful discussion; to Isaac Levi for some enlightening controversies and for drawing my attention to the work of Shackle; not last and not least to Joe Lambert for carefully going through the whole stuff with me twice more and almost forgetting dinner about it; to Jeremy Adler for being so kind to descend from investigating Goethe’s German to correcting and improving my English; and finally to the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for giving me the leisure for preparing the final version of this paper.